Win7 XP Mode Drops Virtualization Hardware Need
Wanting to run XP Mode inside your Windows 7 Professional or Ultimate? Now you don't need a special CPU anymore.
One of the more interesting technologies inside Windows 7 that should ease all sorts of upgrade and application compatibility worries is XP Mode – a virtual Windows XP that can operate inside Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate.
Up until today, those who wanted to run XP Mode in their modern OS would be required to have hardware virtualization support through Intel VT or AMD-V. Now that requirement has been lifted, though those with virtualization hardware will still see better performance.
Microsoft announced the change in a press release dealing with new virtualization initiatives: "Windows XP Mode no longer requires hardware virtualization technology. This change simplifies the experience by making virtualization more accessible to many more PCs for small and midsize businesses wanting to migrate to Windows 7 Professional or higher editions, while still running Windows XP-based productivity applications."
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Good news really, the need for vt on the processor to run some os's isnt needed, specialy for something like xp. If your computer runs 7 fine then you should be fine for running xp virtualy as well.
From what i've played around with ubuntu and virtual box you dont need vt for that either. Hell I got civ3 working fine inside a xp virtual machine running on ubuntu, and my computer is pretty low spec these days. Of course it wasnt that playable, but if you have apps that are xp only then chances are that they are pretty small apps.
Virtual PC on Windows XP can make use of hardware support, but runs happily without it so I'm not surprised they managed the same on Windows 7 (given it is Virtual PC which provides XP Mode). Hardware assistance allows the hypervisor to intercept low level calls in the guest O/S which would otherwise be treated the same as such calls from the host O/S. Without this hardware support, the guest O/S has to be checked to rewrite such calls (hence why this is about performance).
I may be wrong, but doesn't linux always require VT in order to run virtual OSes from within a linux environment?
I ran virtuals in Linux on an old Sempron, which doesn't do hardware virtualisation, for years(until I upgraded) so I think you may be wrong on that one.
Was this a move to merely add support for the mass of Intel CPUs without VT and thus to potentially increase MS' market share, or did Intel have anything to do with it? And if it's not necessary to have hardware virtualisation anymore, will Intel drop it from more of their CPUs? What will AMD do?
I have no idea how pricey it is to add hardware virtualisation to your CPUs but if there's a cost to be cut...
I wonder whether the performance advantage of hardware support is noticable for those who do use virtualisation extensively.
To be honest, 95% of the time it makes no difference at all, and the other 5% you're looking at no more than maybe 10-20% improvement. I've found that things like database servers benefit the most.